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ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

This is an artist's concept of the near stellar environment of the star Beta Pictoris. This illustration is based
upon recent observations made with the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space
Telescope.

This illustration shows three major components of the near stellar region, which is roughly the size of our
inner Solar System. The reddish center ring (C) is a diffuse gas disk, which has a stable orbit around the
star. This ring surrounds an inner disk (D) of gas which is slowly drifting toward the star. The white
"comet-like" features in this bluish disk are dense streams of gas spiraling down the star gravitational
potential "well." The outer filamentary structures (A&B), first detected by the Space Telescope, may be
an expanding gas halo, or foreground features seen in the local interstellar medium.

The disk's structure and dynamics are inferred from the GHRS spectra of Fe II line profiles (left.) The
spectra taken on January 12, 1991 (bold line) are markedly different form those taken 23 days later, (thin
line) on February 4. This indicates the presence of a "lumpy" turbulent cloud of moving gas which
dramatically changes the structure of gas over a short time periods.

A ground based view of the Beta Pictoris system (upper left) shows that the gas disk is embedded deep
within a much broader disk of dust particles more than 100 billion kilometers across which has been
detected previously in ground based observations.